STATEMENT: The Senate Stands with Trump, Against Working Families, Says CAP’s Neera Tanden

Washington, D.C. — Today, the Senate failed to end the longest government shutdown in history after voting on multiple proposals—one the extreme Trump-McConnell bill that was designed to fail, and the other a bipartisan continuing resolution that would fund the government through February 8. Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, issued the following statement in response:

Senators should stop concerning themselves with helping President Donald Trump and instead should be concerned with helping their constituents. Senate conservatives made it crystal clear to the country today that it stands with Trump and against working families when it voted against the same bill the Senate passed in December. The Trump-McConnell bill failed because it was loaded up with poison pills and never designed to actually pass. Today’s votes were absurd theater that unfortunately got us nowhere closer to a fully functioning government.

Now, this out-of-touch administration—which apparently doesn’t understand why 800,000 federal workers and 1.2 million contractors would need to visit a food bank after going without paychecks for weeks—continues to inflict dire pain across the country by holding the American people and government hostage for an ineffective vanity project of a wall.